I also learned that in order to pass our toll-free numbers as our CID numbers instead of the local RTNs for the toll free numbers, apparently our CLEC requires us to have a feature called 'enterprise trunking' enabled and it costs 25 per trunk.

That is a load of shit. Our PRI's from AT&T let any circuit dial out as any DID that we have in our account, no charge.

I know it's a load of shit and I called our account manager out about it while on a conference call with him and management. Unfortunately, he managed to fast-talk talk his way around it to the satisfaction of management. I was too disgusted to listen so I put my phone on mute and finished rebuilding two of our DIDs while he bulshitted his way past management. Unfortunately, one of our phone rooms is handling outbound telemarketing for another company, and the FCC requires that we provide the people we're attempting to sell to a toll free number to call back on. As long as they're distracted by going after Google I don't think they'll notice, but I don't intend to find out. And as far as legal is concerned, my most important job function is keeping us in-line with the FCC regs (followed very closely by maintaining our own SLAs of course).

Yeah, one of mine. I will now studiously ignore the whole case until it's done per standard procedure.

My only concern is that somehow it gets to a point where we have to block Google. Unlikely? Yes, but there was a point (it was a patent dispute, but still) where we couldn't buy a certain brand of Lithium AA battery for almost a year as they were the opposition's product.

That was especially painful because many of our high profile users had wireless keyboards and mice, and regular alkaline AA's wouldn't even last two weeks for some of them. Lithium's last 6 months or more. I'd suggested adding those to office supplies a while before that, and people were quite happy at not having to change batteries so often. Until that case ended, nobody was happy. Nobody.

Also, having an XP machine for about 7 years without reimaging it, you wind up with a surprising number of printer drivers you have no need for, and no idea of when you ever connected to that make/model of printer.

Oh <insert deity>. If that case happens, there's gonna be e-discovery. Of Google.

BPDUGuard is not enabled on any of the 100 plus new switches in my org.

I'm a storage guy, and even I know that not having BPDUguard turned on for your switches can lead to death & chaos if some idiot creates a loop.

In most environments only for a minute, until spanning-tree removes the redundant links. BPDUguard helps in the case where the rogue switch plugged in sends BPDUs, so the BPDUguard port can shutdown immediately instead of waiting for STP convergence. There is no requirement that repeaters send BPDUs, so cheap and/or dumb switches and all hubs do not. Spec requires gigabit repeaters to be switches and not hubs, but has no requirement for spanning-tree or BPDUs.

BPDUguard is not a panacea, in other words, and proper STP with core switches defined as STP roots is more important than BPDUguard. The other measures from that thread still apply even in the presence of BPDUguard.

Thanks. I really appreciate it. I learn so much all the time in this fora and the other tech foras. I well know the limits of my knowledge and work hard to push them back every day.

Something like RSTP should prevent network loops in 2-4 seconds. And no interruption if the port isn't set to portfast.

In one of my IDFs I have two Dell 3448's both with a copper uplink to the core (different physical paths), and the second GbE port connected between them. RSTP knows that is a network loop, and a "backup" route to the core, if either core link gets cut traffic will just resume over the other link, through what used to be a bridge in a disabled state.

Okay, the lack of BPDUGuard in our configs makes more sense. I know that the current CCIE took great pains to get our routed infrastructure designed properly, although I disagree with him in a few tiny details. With some of his subnet choices, our ESX cluster's hosts are bracketed by access devices in various buildings. I would have preferred to have it more segregated to prevent my coworker or my manager from doing something by accident or by design! that might impinge upon our ESXi cluster.

Got promoted today I am now officially a sysadmin instead of just desktop support. It only took a year for this to happen, but that's life in public edu. Pretty stoked. I have tons to learn.

Nice. Only took me 10 years to get my official promotion to go along with my actual job duties. I'm going to be pushing forward on getting another merit based promotion this summer, with the alternate result being leaving the job/transfer.

Pity that my boss still sends me crap helpdesk work. Luckily, I know how to get that crap done via remote scripting for the most part. (EDIT: which is to say, my coworkers don't. They still go onsite for even the simplest of things)

And yes, part of that is due to internal politics generated by our "voice/data communications" guy who only changes names and phone extensions. Ever since he was caught short trying to blame me for wiring changes done while I was on vacation and for which he was the proximate cause, he's redoubled his efforts. It's kind of like how Wormtongue has the ear of The King of Rohan, such that all reason and logic leaves him.

Got promoted today I am now officially a sysadmin instead of just desktop support. It only took a year for this to happen, but that's life in public edu. Pretty stoked. I have tons to learn.

Congrats! A year is a really short time for Desktop Support. @ our firm it takes that long to really learn all the crap they get asked to deal with. I did my tour, and learned a lot, but getting out was the best thing for me and the team. Me for not having to do it anymore , and them for having to step up their game without me.

Weird that there's a movie with the same thing in it. That site was never used for a movie AFAIK.

Maybe it was based on a true story?

Quote:

One of our "Solution Architects" just spec'd two servers with 12 cores, 12 GB RAM, and 1TB of RAID 10 SAS storage each to perform Websense URL filtering for an environment with 40 Virtual hosts.

That's one hell of a solution he just architected!

Well, part of that is because Websense is a horrible product. Last I used it a few years ago, the DB was over 6 gig compressed and had to be loaded into memory. Then they did some weird shit for updates, where they downloaded the file to a tmp name, then renamed the old file, then copied (not moved!) the tmp file to the permanent file and reloaded the DB. That's like 20 gig. For a product that runs on firewalls that typically have small HDs. Oh, and since the DB was compressed which meant loading it to memory took anywhere from 5-30 minutes depending on how busy the firewall was. Lord knows that 12 GB RAM is probably only enough for another year before the DB gets even larger.

Quote:

I would have preferred to have it more segregated to prevent my coworker or my manager from doing something by accident or by design! that might impinge upon our ESXi cluster.

There are no technical protocols that can save you from your boss. None.

Got promoted today I am now officially a sysadmin instead of just desktop support. It only took a year for this to happen, but that's life in public edu. Pretty stoked. I have tons to learn.

Congratulations! The day I finally moved out of desktop support into sysadmin was one of the highlights of my work history. Mostly because, as I'm sure you would agree, fuck desktop support.

Oh, yes definitely! I was getting a bit burned out. They have been giving me a lot more responsbility/sysadmin responsbilities beforehand though to keep me interested. Glad it's official now, though.

PsychoStreak wrote:

Congrats! A year is a really short time for Desktop Support. @ our firm it takes that long to really learn all the crap they get asked to deal with. I did my tour, and learned a lot, but getting out was the best thing for me and the team. Me for not having to do it anymore , and them for having to step up their game without me.

I meant I knew my boss was asking for this for me for a year I actually started this job about 2.5 years ago when I was a 2nd year college student. I am graduating this month.

That when trying to put self tapping screws into aluminium plenum it does help if you put the drill in Forward mode. Part 2 is that if a drill is on reverse and you put enough weight behind it said screws will get through.....

I learned that our version of Veritas doesn't like 1.3Tb luns.. and that after a 13 hour event, I have to gut all the disks and re-carve it up 680Gb ldevs... The good news is they paged me out at 8:30, the bad news is I still spent 2 hours on the call this morning.. Oncall this week has been BAD...

That something as simple as Dev -> Test -> Acceptance -> Production is apparently unthinkable to some people.By this I don't mean people trying to fast track stuff from dev to production, minor differencees in configuration or anything really technical, I mean that a LOT of people can't even comprehend the basic concept and somehow manage to get confused and have no idea what environment does what, or even what environments even exist at all.This is despite me describing it at meetings, documenting it in both words and Visio diagrams, drawing it on white boards, and having separate DNS sub domains called strange things like test.domain.com, accept.domain.com and so forth.These are developers and project managers by the way, not sales people or the receptionist.Jesus fuck...

Oh and while I'm at it, apparently having "Linux experience" in an IT setting now means having used Ubuntu on your desktop at home. Yeah and I'm a Windows admin with some experience as an astronaut because I use Windows 7 to play EVE Online.

Oh and while I'm at it, apparently having "Linux experience" in an IT setting now means having used Ubuntu on your desktop at home. Yeah and I'm a Windows admin with some experience as an astronaut because I use Windows 7 to play EVE Online.

Oh and while I'm at it, apparently having "Linux experience" in an IT setting now means having used Ubuntu on your desktop at home. Yeah and I'm a Windows admin with some experience as an astronaut because I use Windows 7 to play EVE Online.

Oh and while I'm at it, apparently having "Linux experience" in an IT setting now means having used Ubuntu on your desktop at home. Yeah and I'm a Windows admin with some experience as an astronaut because I use Windows 7 to play EVE Online.

Everything else aside, I LOLed at this.

Plus if I understand how EVE works he has e-commerce experience too!

Everyone knows that playing EVE means you get automatic certification from MS with Excel

That when trying to put self tapping screws into aluminium plenum it does help if you put the drill in Forward mode. Part 2 is that if a drill is on reverse and you put enough weight behind it said screws will get through.....

I've done that before. Twice. I suspected both times the metal finally decided to just open up out of pity.

Oh and while I'm at it, apparently having "Linux experience" in an IT setting now means having used Ubuntu on your desktop at home. Yeah and I'm a Windows admin with some experience as an astronaut because I use Windows 7 to play EVE Online.

Everything else aside, I LOLed at this.

Plus if I understand how EVE works he has e-commerce experience too!

Well, depending on how long he's played Eve, there's something to be said. Some of the old builds were abysmal and required some in-depth stuff to get them to work properly. Yeah, I've got a character on there. Not active ATM, though.

Oh and while I'm at it, apparently having "Linux experience" in an IT setting now means having used Ubuntu on your desktop at home. Yeah and I'm a Windows admin with some experience as an astronaut because I use Windows 7 to play EVE Online.

Everything else aside, I LOLed at this.

Plus if I understand how EVE works he has e-commerce experience too!

Everyone knows that playing EVE means you get automatic certification from MS with Excel

The real upside is that if you can get over EVE's learning cliff, you can learn your vendor's licensing policies.

That something as simple as Dev -> Test -> Acceptance -> Production is apparently unthinkable to some people.By this I don't mean people trying to fast track stuff from dev to production, minor differencees in configuration or anything really technical, I mean that a LOT of people can't even comprehend the basic concept and somehow manage to get confused and have no idea what environment does what, or even what environments even exist at all.This is despite me describing it at meetings, documenting it in both words and Visio diagrams, drawing it on white boards, and having separate DNS sub domains called strange things like test.domain.com, accept.domain.com and so forth.These are developers and project managers by the way, not sales people or the receptionist.Jesus fuck...

Yep, this blow my mind as well. Exactly as you say: it's not that they want to put things directly into production, they just act confused every time (sometimes multiple times a week) about the fundamental concepts.

Oh and while I'm at it, apparently having "Linux experience" in an IT setting now means having used Ubuntu on your desktop at home. Yeah and I'm a Windows admin with some experience as an astronaut because I use Windows 7 to play EVE Online.

If you've taken the initiated to learn how to do things they haven't then that's their problem, not yours.

We fired two people Friday because they refused to update their skill sets, one of them had been here for 28 years. It sucked but if you're an AS/400 person and your company no longer has an AS/400 you gotta think maybe it's time to take some classes etc.

That when I walk in and get told I Have to bring a new computer to one of our branches 26 miles away that invariably the machine will be working when I get there. They did though have ice cream cake in the breakroom, which made up for it.

In consolation I got to see 2 of these, which aren't that common here in SC.

It sucked but if you're an AS/400 person and your company no longer has an AS/400 you gotta think maybe it's time to take some classes etc.

Bull. That's when it's time to get into an AS400 consulting company

Although updating your skills even in that scenario is a good idea, so you know what the hell people are talking about when they come to you for integration between their spiffy new system and your old (er, sorry, reliable) system.

That a security update to MySQL on our dev system will have no issues, but promptly explode the web app it's driving on live. The only difference between the dev system and the live is that one runs on VMWare in-house and live is running on Linode.

And the logs are no help, just a "Segmentation fault (11)" from Aapche which means I get to debug it the hard way (as opposed to helpful log entries that indicate who the problem is). Hooray!

Edit: and our intermediate staging server, which has the exact module loadout of live, runs just fine post update. Which makes this more frustrating. So, two successful test installs, followed by Armageddon on live. Awesome.

Final Edit: Original post was after I'd already been working on it for a couple hours. Final solution was complete removal of MySQL, purge of the apt cache and clean install, followed by a restore of the code and database from 6 AM PST. I strongly dislike failures that leave nothing useful in the logs.

Final solution was complete removal of MySQL, purge of the apt cache and clean install, followed by a restore of the code and database from 6 AM PST. I strongly dislike failures that leave nothing useful in the logs.

Read up on what a segmentation fault is and where you find the "logs". What you're looking for is a core dump, which will have more useful information than you can digest...

Apache segfaulting is usually really php segfaulting, and in this case you likely did not have *everything* identical - I'd put money on one of your php modules being different on prod or linked against a different version of some library (wild guess - mysql or mysqi client).

The only difference between the dev system and the live is that one runs on VMWare in-house and live is running on Linode.

That's a hell of a difference. Why isn't the dev system on Linode as well?

Because my boss is cheap and I have no say other than actual administration. I have begged and pleaded for him to hire a Linux expert to audit what I've been doing, because this (Linux) is not my area of expertise.

To this point (nearly 2 years) this difference hasn't been an issue. Apart from this, they run the same OS, they all (should) have had the same software and modules installed using the same commands, and config files are identical.

sporkme wrote:

LodeRunner wrote:

Final solution was complete removal of MySQL, purge of the apt cache and clean install, followed by a restore of the code and database from 6 AM PST. I strongly dislike failures that leave nothing useful in the logs.

Read up on what a segmentation fault is and where you find the "logs". What you're looking for is a core dump, which will have more useful information than you can digest...

Apache segfaulting is usually really php segfaulting, and in this case you likely did not have *everything* identical - I'd put money on one of your php modules being different on prod or linked against a different version of some library (wild guess - mysql or mysqi client).

I did enable core dumps in Apache config, it refused to generate anything (which indicated that I did it wrong; found what it was while writing this, now I get core dumps).

Weird that one of the modules would be different, every time I do updates, I start with dev, then staging. As soon as I verify that those have not broken, I roll to live. Guess I need to dump a list from dpkg on all 3 and look for differences. Just frustrating that this made it past the staging system which doesn't have the dev tools on it and is refreshed (DB and code) from live anytime they get ready to push new code.

Other thing I learned today: I really need to find a good Linux admin class and beat funding out of my employer for it. Up to this project, I've always been a Windows network admin and general troubleshooter, so this has been a fun, if occasionally frustrating, experience.

That processing failed component returns for Oracle is havening caused me the angry. An FE shall be dispatched for all hardware failures from this point forward no matter how trivial the repair. More time spent on TNS poisoning patches vs. PRT processing would do the entire world some good...

Being bombarded with ads and handing a map of my infrastructure to a third party isn't my idea of a good time. But I've met other people who seem to really like it. It never sounded like my thing however.

Although: on the topic of free software, PostgreSQL keeps surprising me every day with what it's capable of. (By extension, I also surprise my management. This is good.)